by Scientists are building a digital space model of Earth to improve the forecasting of solar storms and their effects on infrastructure.
Almost seven decades into the space age, scientists understand space weather still very raw. Unlike ground weather, which is now predicted by powerful supercomputers with amazing accuracy and timeliness, space weather forecasts are more hit and miss.
Most of the time, an inaccurate space weather forecast means someone is up aurora-Viewing expectations are not met. But humanity is increasingly dependent on technologies that are vulnerable to the whims of space weather. From brief radio blackouts to GPS If sustained disruptions and power outages occur, space weather can wipe out our daily lives — perhaps less frequently than heavy rains and windstorms, but with similar intensity.
A new model, developed by a team of researchers led by the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Johns Hopkins University, is a step towards closing the gap between space and Earth weather predictions. Scientists admit, however, that it may take decades for space weather forecasting to fully catch up.
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“We cannot predict space weather without first deeply understanding the physics behind it,” Slava Merkin, a space physicist at APL and director of its Center for Geospatial Storms (CGS), told Space.com. “We’re building the model and doing science with the model and, through that, we’re discovering the physics of geospace storms.”
Geospace is a term scientists use to describe the region around our planet that encompasses it Worldupper atmosphere and surrounding space. With the new model, called Multiscale Atmospheric-Geospace Environment (MAGE), the researchers are trying to take processes in geospace up to the distance of 1.2 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Earth, said Merkin. That’s a huge region, stretching four times the distance from the planet the moon. But Earth’s influence on the cosmos extends even further. The outermost edge of the Earth’s magnetosphere, its magnetosphere, can be traced nearly 4 million miles (6.5 million km) from Earth in the direction away from the sun.
Generated by the movement of the molten metal inside The core of the Earththe magnetosphere interacts with bursts of solar wind — the streams of charged particles constantly emanating from the sun. This interaction produces the space-time events we experience on Earth. The process is extremely complicated, Merkin said. It involves poorly understood physical interactions that occur in the thermosphere (the second highest level of The Earth’s Atmosphere) and the ionosphere (an overlapping region containing high concentrations of charged particles created in interactions with ultraviolet light from the sun).
“Our number one challenge is to treat this system holistically,” Merkin said. “But the problem is that each of these fields is governed by different physics. They are different plasma populations, different gas particles, and they are all engaged in very complex interactions, especially during geomagnetic storms.”
The team celebrated a breakthrough in 2020 when their new model provided unprecedented insights into formation bead-like structures in aurora sometimes seen over Earth’s polar regions ahead of major geomagnetic storms. The MAGE model showed that these pearls of aurora arise when magnetic lines in the magnetosphere stretch farther from the planet before geomagnetic storms and then slingshot bubbles of light plasma toward Earth.
But the discovery also aptly illustrated the difficulty of predicting space weather. Like the proverbial wave of a butterfly’s wing, a physical process in a distant region of geospace can produce visible and measurable effects close to the Earth’s surface.
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“The computer model we are developing must be able to process processes that occur on very large scales but also those on very small scales,” said Merkin. “At the same time, it needs to capture all of the different physics problems and understand how the different domains – the lower and middle atmosphere, the ionosphere and the magnetosphere – affect together.”
Unlike terrestrial weather forecast models, which decompose millions of measurements taken every day around the world by hundreds of thousands of weather stations, airlines and high-altitude balloons, MAGE has to do with far fewer data points.
“At any given time, we have very few spacecraft out there in this vast region,” Merkin said. “The point-to-point measurements can be very accurate, especially with recent spacecraft, but we don’t have the coverage to really know what’s going on at the system level.”
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Merkin and his colleagues have access to data accumulated since the dawn of the space age. Still, there are big gaps. For example, the lower layer of the thermophosphates, located at an altitude between 60 and 120 miles (100 to 200 km) and sometimes titled the “.ignorosphereToo high for stratospheric balloons to reach but too low for satellites to explore, ignorance is what happens to urease. satellites higher in the atmosphere, along with information from radars and other sensors on the ground.
“As we go, the model becomes more and more complex,” said Merkin. “We’re adding more and more physics. The final product will represent geospace in its ultimate complexity.”
Merkin admits it could take decades before researchers get there. Modeling space weather is an extremely complex endeavor. The MAGE collaboration involves dozens of software engineers, computer scientists, physicists and other experts working in research laboratories across the U.S. In addition to APL, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of New Hampshire, Rice University, Virginia Tech, UCLA and Syntek technologies are contributing to the effort.
